How mature is the Microsoft Code Contracts framework?

Question

Microsoft has recently put a release of their Code Contracts framework on DevLabs with a commercial license. We\'re interested on using them in our project (mostly C#, some C++/

Answer 1

I've been playing around with the code contracts some more myself on a small but moderately complex standalone project, which needs to inherit from some BCL classes and use other ones.

The contracts thing seems great when you're working in a completely isolated environment with just your own code and primitive types, but as soon as you start using BCL classes (which until .NET 4.0 do not have their own contracts) the verifier cannot check whether they will violate any of the requires/ensures/invariants and so you get a lot of warnings about potentially unsatisfied constraints.

On the other hand, it does find some invalid or potentially unsatisfied constraints which could be real bugs. But it's very hard to find these because there is so much noise that it's hard to find out which ones you can fix. It's possible to suppress the warnings from the BCL classes by using the assume mechanism, but this is somewhat self-defeating as these classes will have contracts in the future and assumptions will lessen their worth.

So my feeling is that for now, because in 3.5 we're trying to build on a framework that the verifier does not sufficiently understand, that it's probably worth waiting for 4.0.